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The predicate is a verb phrase that consists of more than one word. In the backyard, the dog barked and howled at the cat. This simple sentence has one independent clause which contains one subject, dog, and one predicate, barked and howled at the cat. This predicate has two verbs, known as a compound predicate: barked and howled. (This should ...
A predicative expression (or just predicative) is part of a clause predicate, and is an expression that typically follows a copula or linking verb, e.g. be, seem, appear, or that appears as a second complement of a certain type of verb, e.g. call, make, name, etc. [1] The most frequently acknowledged types of predicative expressions are predicative adjectives (also predicate adjectives) and ...
Predicates may also be collective or distributive. Collective predicates require their subjects to be somehow plural, while distributive ones do not. An example of a collective predicate is "formed a line". This predicate can only stand in a nexus with a plural subject: The students formed a line. — Collective predicate appears with plural ...
However, the term oblique is also used for languages without a nominative case, such as ergative–absolutive languages; in the Northwest Caucasian languages, for example, the oblique-case marker serves to mark the ergative, dative, and applicative case roles, contrasting with the absolutive case, which is unmarked.
The following two examples show how the argument structure of the verb "consider" affects what predicate can be in the small clause. [38] I consider [ Mr. Nyman a genius]. *I consider [ Mr. Nyman in my shed]. Example (18) is ungrammatical as the verb "consider" does take an NP complement, but not a PP complement. [38]
A single case may contain many different endings, some of which may even be derived from different roots. For example, in Polish, the genitive case has -a, -u, -ów, -i/-y, -e-for nouns, and -ego, -ej, -ich/-ych for adjectives. To a lesser extent, a noun's animacy or humanness may add another layer of complexity. For example, in Russian:
For example, verbs may be specified according to the number and type of objects or other complements which they take. This is called subcategorization . Many modern descriptions of grammar include not only lexical categories or word classes, but also phrasal categories , used to classify phrases , in the sense of groups of words that form units ...
For example, in the sentence "As for the little girl, the dog bit her", the subject is "the dog" but the topic is "the little girl". Topic being what is being talked about and the subject being what is doing the action can, also, be distinct concepts from the concept agent (or actor)—the "doer", which is defined by semantics , that is, by the ...